Reason is in harmony with this authoritative testimony. It is not natural to suppose that people who have claimed property in their brethren, God’s children,--who have indulged that “wild and guilty fantasy that man can hold property in man,”--will become at once the kind and just legislators of freedmen. It is unnatural to expect it. Even if they have made up their minds to Emancipation, they are, from inveterate habit and prejudice, incapable of justice to the colored race. There is the President himself, who once charmed the country and the age by announcing himself the “Moses” of their redemption; and yet he now exerts all his mighty power against the establishment of safeguards without which there can be no true redemption. In present discussion, the old proslavery spirit that was in him, with hostility to principles and to men, comes out anew,--as, on the application of heat, the old tunes frozen up in the bugle of Baron Munchausen were set a-going and broke forth freshly. People do not change suddenly or completely. The old devils are not all cast out at once. Even the best of converts sometimes backslide. From so grave a writer as Southey, in his History of Brazil, we learn that a woman accustomed to consider human flesh an exquisite dainty was converted to Christianity in extreme old age. The faithful missionary strove at once to minister to her wants, and asked if there was any particular food she could take, suggesting various delicacies; to all which the venerable convert replied: “My stomach goes against everything. There is but one thing which I think I could touch. If I had the little hand of a little tender Tapuya boy, I think I could pick the little bones. But, woe is me! there is nobody to go out and shoot one for me!”[71] In similar spirit our Presidential convert now yearns for a taste of those odious pretensions which were a part of Slavery. Now, when a person thus situated, with great responsibilities to his country and to history, bound by public professions and by political associations, who has declared himself against Slavery, and has every motive for perseverance to the end,--when such a person openly seeks to preserve its odious pretensions, are we not admonished again how unsafe it must be to trust old masters, under no responsibility and no pledge, with the power of legislating for freedmen? I protest against it. I claim this power for the Nation. If it be said that the power has never been employed, then I say that the time has come for its employment. I claim it on at least three several grounds.